Skip to contents

Introduction to yarraWQ

yarraWQ-intro.Rmd

Overview

The yarraWQ package provides cleaned water quality data collected from the Yarra River monitoring program in Victoria, Australia. It also includes helper functions and an interactive Shiny app to explore changes in key water quality parameters such as pH, temperature, turbidity, and dissolved oxygen over time.

Loading the package 

library(yarraWQ)

Exploring the data 

head(yarra_wq)
#>   site_id                 name            datetime data_type parameter_id
#> 1  229143 YARRA @ CHANDLER HWY 1991-01-08 13:50:00   Quality          210
#> 2  229143 YARRA @ CHANDLER HWY 1991-02-12 09:35:00   Quality          210
#> 3  229143 YARRA @ CHANDLER HWY 1991-03-12 14:00:00   Quality          210
#> 4  229143 YARRA @ CHANDLER HWY 1991-04-09 11:00:00   Quality          210
#> 5  229143 YARRA @ CHANDLER HWY 1991-05-07 11:10:00   Quality          210
#> 6  229143 YARRA @ CHANDLER HWY 1991-06-11 10:25:00   Quality          210
#>   parameter value unit_of_measurement quality resolution                date
#> 1        pH   7.1                  pH      65   Raw Data 1991-01-08 13:50:00
#> 2        pH   7.0                  pH      65   Raw Data 1991-02-12 09:35:00
#> 3        pH   6.2                  pH      65   Raw Data 1991-03-12 14:00:00
#> 4        pH   6.7                  pH      65   Raw Data 1991-04-09 11:00:00
#> 5        pH   7.7                  pH      65   Raw Data 1991-05-07 11:10:00
#> 6        pH   6.9                  pH      65   Raw Data 1991-06-11 10:25:00
#>   year month weekday hour period
#> 1 1991   Jan     Tue   13  1990s
#> 2 1991   Feb     Tue    9  1990s
#> 3 1991   Mar     Tue   14  1990s
#> 4 1991   Apr     Tue   11  1990s
#> 5 1991   May     Tue   11  1990s
#> 6 1991   Jun     Tue   10  1990s

The dataset yarra_wq contains 876 rows and 16 variables, including:

  • site_id: Monitoring site ID

  • name: Site name

  • date, year, month: Observation date

  • parameter: Parameter measured (e.g., pH, temperature)

  • value: Recorded measurement

  • unit_of_measurement: Measurement unit (e.g., mg/L, NTU, °C)

Visualising a parameter

The function plot_yarra_metric() creates a simple time series plot for one chosen parameter (e.g., “pH”).

plot_yarra_metric(parameter_name = "pH")

You can also filter by specific monitoring sites:

unique(yarra_wq$name)[1:3]
#> [1] "YARRA @ CHANDLER HWY" NA                     NA

Interactive exploration with Shiny

For a more flexible exploration, you can launch the interactive app included in the package. This app is not run while building the vignette.

The Shiny app allows users to:

  • Select a parameter and site

  • View corresponding trends interactively

  • Compare results across multiple sites

Summary

yarraWQ demonstrates how to turn a reproducible analysis pipeline into an R package that includes both reusable functions and an interactive interface for exploration.